Image ALT Tags and Search Engine Optimization

Dec 21st 09 Posted by Nicholas Halmond in SEO

There are many little tricks you can utilize to give your site a boost in the search engines. One thing you can do to help your SEO strategy is to properly use image ALT tags on all of the graphics and photos on your web pages.

The ALT tag contains a description of the graphic. You can enter any information you want, but it makes sense to add text relevant to the graphic. After all, the purpose of the ALT tag is to provide your site visitors with a text description when your images don’t load. That way they know the purpose behind the little red X that should have been an image.

The importance of this is that different browsers display things differently, which is especially true today with the prevalence of mobile web browsing. Additionally, sometimes image files get corrupted or called incorrectly and in other cases people who cannot see use aural browsers that read the page to them.

For that reason, you should get in the habit of using your image ALT tags every time you put new graphics onto your web pages. That way you can still get your point across and your page won’t have blank holes where the graphics should have been. However, image ALT tags have additional SEO benefits as well.

The ALT tag provides an excellent opportunity to include more of your targeted keywords and phrases into your page content. If you write a brief sentence describing every image on your page using your targeted keywords and phrases, you are easily adding more keyword inclusion to your content.

Additionally, because these ALT tags don’t show up in your normal page content you aren’t just keyword stuffing. You won’t come up looking like spam at all, and instead just get to smartly include more of your keywords without any negative side effects. Therefore it’s an essential SEO strategy for any webmaster.

Another reason using image ALT tags is great for SEO is because it makes your images come up in image search results for those terms. So when web surfers search Google images or another image search site, your website has a chance of getting additional exposure it might not otherwise get to take advantage of.

When the person sees your image, he may click on it to see a larger version or click onto your website to see what it is about. In this way, using image ALT tags work to bring you more free traffic. If your site has several images, this could work to bring you significant targeted traffic.

In this way, you are able to benefit from using image ALT tags. This SEO trick should be one that you always use when placing images on your site. It not only benefits you but it benefits your site visitors when your graphics don’t load so it is a win-win for everyone.

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